The Shape of Things Misremembered

It’s 10:30 PM and I’m scrunched down in bed, pressing buttons on the TV remote. The lights are off, the curtains are drawn, and my clothes hang like ghosts off the backs of chairs. An overweight woman in shorts and sloppy t-shirt flashes on the screen, followed by the image of a fit, smiling woman in a red dress. At the top of the fit woman’s screen is the word AFTER. I turn up the volume. It’s an infomercial advertising a pill that burns fat. Eat the foods you love and still lose weight, says the voice overlay. My hands snake beneath the covers and rest on my belly, slightly mounded, the memory of dinner.

Thirty years ago my friend Kay, home on spring break from college, drove up my parents’ driveway and slid, paper thin and almost see-through, out of her car. We went to The Magic Pan for dinner, where she ordered a single crepe and a Diet Coke. Her movements were slow, her face regretful; her long chestnut-colored hair hung in dry ropy hanks. With the precision of a surgeon she made an incision down the center of her crepe, scraped out the creamy contents, then folded the empty, flat pastry into her mouth.

That same summer I had dinner with my high school friend Leigh. At the Shoney’s buffet I watched as she piled her plate with a salad whose lettuce peaks barely poked out of a sea of ranch dressing, then topped it with fried mushrooms, four squares of cornbread, three fried chicken breasts, several hamburger patties, and two rolls. She ate quickly, pushing the food into her mouth with her fingers, swallowing hard and gulping water. She never paused, and never looked up.

When she’d eaten everything, she jumped from her chair and ran to the bathroom. On the way home, eyes watery and cheeks red from the strain of vomiting, she scooped Rocky Road ice cream from a gallon carton in her lap with her cupped fingers, and when that was gone she opened the car door, leaned out into the dark street, and vomited again.

Three years later I would be standing at my mother’s sink at breakfast, stabbing a knife hole into a cherry tomato and squeezing its tiny guts down the drain. Next I would scoop out the inside, bready part of a quarter-bagel and throw that down the drain as well, after which I spread the hollowed crust with a translucent veneer of cream cheese. Finally I would nestle the spent cherry tomato into the bagel’s hull, the solitary occupant of my minuscule bagel canoe, and eat the whole thing in twenty tiny, savoring bites.

Over my shoulder, my mother stood watch, making her own breakfast of diet toast slice, cucumber, a whisper of cheese, and black coffee with saccharin. Behind us at the kitchen table, my father ate his corn flakes and read the newspaper. It was a noisy, unconscious affair of spoon-clanking, slurping, and paper rifling, the business he went about as illness and unrest flowered under his nose: there was me, starving, and there was my mother, dreaming of emptiness, of making with surgeons precision an incision down the center of her life, and scraping my father out.

The objects of our disaffection were different, but the premise was the same: if we didn’t know or couldn’t fix what was wrong with our lives, then we could and would fix what we perceived was wrong with our selves: our rounded female bellies, over which we secretly placed our hands a hundred thousand times a day, wishing away the flesh of unrest.

On TV, the woman in the red dress lifts a slice of pizza enticingly to her lips. Her eyes address the camera. “I’m eating all this and I’m not worried,” they say.

“Really?” we say, the Kays and the Leighs, the mothers and the daughters, and all the boys and men who have joined the crusade against the flesh. “You’re not worried?”

For fifteen minutes I listen to the testimonials of three attractive, thin women who, just months earlier, according to the ad, were unhappily overweight. And then a strange thing happens. I step away from myself in the bed.

It has been over 30 years since I stood at my mother’s sink, draining my cherry tomato so as not to add onto my 81-pound frame. Likewise it has been over 30 years since I spent nearly 4 months in the hospital addressing the depression and family dysfunction underlying my compulsion to starve. Even so, in every weight loss infomercial, in every overheard complaint in a dressing room, on every calorie chart on the back of every loaf of bread, there is an invitation, an open door, that leads down a dark corridor of promise. It’s the promise of a better self: a happier, smarter, funnier, more fulfilled and attractive me, attainable simply by starving.

These days the temptation is just a tug, a mostly annoying tap on the shoulder that, when I turn around, reveals itself as a familiar foe. You again, I say. And because I am recovered–because I got treatment before it was too late—I know that if my belly is too big it is a lie, reflecting in direct proportion the shape of things misremembered: reflecting not fullness, but emptiness. And so I close the door.

Some of you here tonight have had an eating disorder. Some of you know someone who has one, and some of you work with ED patients. Whatever your role, you know that eating disorders are like an octopus whose tentacles reach deep into the lives of sufferers, corrupting their relationship with food and interfering with friendships, love relationships, school, work, family. You know that beneath every eating disorder there is a crushing lack of self-esteem, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and compulsivity.

And you know that these can drive any number of self-destructive behaviors including cutting, alcohol or drug abuse, and crossover eating disorders. You also probably know that EDs have the highest death rate of all the mental illnesses. I didn’t know it at the time, but my friend Leigh was bulimic, anorexic, and alcoholic. She died 10 years ago at the age of 47.

A lot has changed in the field of eating disorder treatment since I suffered with anorexia over thirty years ago. Today we know more about genetic components, family dynamics, and brain chemistry, and there are many more treatment options available.

But here’s what hasn’t changed: we cannot fight what we cannot see, and because of this, treatment must slice, like a surgeon’s knife, down the center of the disorder, and expose the contents: all of the shame, the hopelessness, the obsessions, the anger, the fears, and the depression driving the illness. And of course, treatment must expose the delusion that starving, binging and purging do anything other than obscure what’s really wrong.

Lastly, here’s what else hasn’t changed: recovery demands something profoundly difficult and yet monumentally important for ED patients: the courage to allow themselves a leap of faith—a willingness to believe, if only in small moments at first, that true healing can and will come from closing the doors.

We are so lucky to have Focus, and the Manna Fund, which make available just such treatment. Thank you, and have a wonderful night!